Friday, May 20, 2005

I recently conducted a search for the Chair of CCA’s grad fine art program. In the course of the interviews one of the leading candidates stated that he believed that there is ‘one true art world,’ embodied by the leading international galleries, the major art magazines, and, above all, the international biennial circuit. The lingua franca of this art world, in his opinion, is conceptualism in all its various manifestations. In his view, an art school that does not prepare students to compete in this world is doomed to irrelevance.

There is something appealing about this perspective. For one thing, it has the virtue of clarity. These days—thanks to President Bush’s no-child-left-behind initiative--educational institutions are being held ever more accountable for their goals, objectives, and above all, metrics. This mandate is spilling over from federally funded institutions into privately funded institutions like CCA. I was, for example, recently asked to fill out a form titled “Educational Effectiveness Indicators,” as part of our accreditation process. The big question is how do we know that our students arelearning what they are supposed to be learning? First, though, one has to know what they are supposed to be learning. Which is where the ‘one true art world’ comes in handy. To compete in the ‘one true art world’ one needs to know about a relatively fixed set of methods, artists, institutions, writers, and curators. The knowledge and skills a student obtains in art school can become tools to enter into and succeed in this world.

Imagine how simple it would be if we really could identify some set of galleries, alternative spaces, museums, biennials, and art magazines which could then be calibrated according to the degree of ‘success’ participation in each conferred. We might identify, for example, 100 galleries that legitimately signal an artist’s entry into ‘emerging artist’ status—‘emerging,’ that is, into the ‘one true art world.’ Another much smaller set of, say, 25 galleries could be used to identify artists who had attained ‘one true art world’ citizenship. Each art magazine, meanwhile, would carry a numerical weight: being mentioned in Artforum would carry the highest reward, followed by Frieze, Art in America, and so on, down to Coagula, for which points would be deducted. To make the system even richer and more statistically meaningful, imagine that every curator, too, came with a certain numerical rating. To be curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist might get you a score of 100; to be put in a show by me, for example, perhaps only 50.Using this matrix, one could, hypothetically, arrive at a quasi- mathematical means of calculating an artist’s success at various stages of their career after graduation. By pooling such information from a cohort of graduates one could accurately gauge the effectiveness of an art school’s educational program. Besides providing a clearly measurable standard of success, the ‘one true art world’ has other things going for it. Fame and fortune, for example. Contemporary art has become a hot commodity. My father regularly sends me articles from Barron’s and other financial journals extolling the rise of art as a sound investment vehicle. Having attended several leading art fairs over the past year, I can honestly say that what I witnessed was a ‘feeding frenzy.’ The prices of even entry-level artists were double or triple what they might have been a year or two ago. Although speculation on contemporary art has extended beyond the handful of well-known names—Matthew Barney, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and so on—it must be said that the boost in prices is circumscribed within a tightly ordered institutional frame. What matters most is which gallery you show with and your gallery’s ability to be selected—and it is a highly competitive selection process—into one of the handful of leading international art fairs such as New York’s Armory art fair (which is, confusingly, not held at the Armory), or the Basel Art Fair (the one, even moreconfusingly, held in Miami). The parents in the audience will be pleased to know that artists who successfully enter into this world have a very good chance of being able to pay off their student loans.

Participating in the ‘one true art world’ also has the virtue of drawing one into a global conversation. Because, as my fine arts chair candidate observed, the ‘one true art world’ shares a common language, those who participate are naturally invited into a dialogue with others who share that language. Indeed, the mode of conceptualism—characterized today by an interplay of text (English only please) and image and an emphasis on content over form--has reached even the most remote territories of the world. A few years ago I traveled to 25 countries on four continents, doing research for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum. I found that artists in places as remote as Cuba, Vietnam, Colombia, and the Philippines were doing work that would be as easily accessible to an American art audience as to audiences of artists in their own countries. Working with conceptual methods per se is not what makes this art world so unified as much as simply the fact of a shared vocabulary of forms, methods, and references. To avoid working with these means is to effectively shut oneself off from an extremely engaging global dialogue.

The apotheosis of the ‘one true art world’ is the international biennial exhibition. Such exhibitions, which have proliferated extraordinarily over the past decade, are global round-ups of work identified by a coterie of peripatetic curators who scour the globe for the most engaging new art. Seeing works of art in various global contexts has the benefit of exposing images and ideas to broad audiences as well as testing the relevance of works of art in various cultural contexts. Furthermore, we have clearly entered an age where everyone on the globe is engaged in common concerns, from climate change, to terrorism, to mass migration, to the spread of infectious disease. International biennials have become, in part, forums for engaging in debate on such timely themes. In some cases, as with the recent Documenta, such discussions nearly eclipse the presentation of the artworks themselves. As has been frequently observed, one shortcoming of the current international exhibition system is that, for reasons of efficiency—the world is a very big place--curators’ searches for art works often takes place in biennials themselves, leading to a rather incestuous condition in which a limited set of artists and even artworks cycle again and again through this international exhibition circuit. Yet, it is clear that the compounding effect of such multiple exposure has a salutary impact of the careers of those who are welcomed into the ‘one true art world.’

Why, then, did I not hire this particular candidate? What art school would not want to prepare its students to compete in such a cosmopolitan, remunerative, and intellectually stimulating mileau? To begin with, the ‘one true art world’ is a lie. There is no more ‘one true art world’ than there is ‘one true music world’ or ‘one true writing world.’ Certainly there are many whose financial and professional interests compel them to profess such a thing, yet, thankfully, despite appearances, the scope of global creativity has not yet narrowed to such a radical point. While I think there are dangers in making analogies between politics and artistic practice, I can’t help but note the similarities between the ‘one true art world’ doctrine and that of America’s triumphalist neo- conservatives.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, when it seemed that the world was on the verge of at last obtaining a peaceful, multilateral status, American neo-cons laid the foundation for what has become the age of American Empire. At the heart of neo-conservative ideology is the notion that America’s ‘way of life’ is the best in the world and that no one in their right mind would not want to live the way we do. At least in principle, this doctrine asks us to imagine a world that enjoys all the freedoms and economic opportunities thatwe enjoy right here at home. However, evidence suggests that this appeal to global equality cynically masks a more rapacious agenda. In fact, neo-conservative doctrine is based on the unassailable superiority of America’s military (including the once repugnant, now-official policy of pre-emptive military strikes), neo-liberal economic theory (the selective application of which has greatly benefited American businesses while ruining the economies of poorer countries around the world), and the international export of American-style democracy (a praiseworthy ideal that seems to be executed only whenever it is immediately beneficial to American business or strategic interests.) The Bush administration’s support for Uzbekistan’s brutal regime alone indicates the hypocritical selectivity of our country’s ‘democratizing’ agenda. At heart, the neo-con game is to dress the wolf of American hegemony in the sheep’s clothing of equality, democracy, and free-trade for all. The neo-con American triumphalism that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War as an alternative to multilateralism, finds an aesthetic echo in the ‘one true art world.’ Both phenomena are marked by a profound narrowing of options at precisely the moment when a radical openness seemed newly possible. In the case of the neo-con agenda, the need for an American Empire crowded out diverse opportunities offered by the end of the Cold War. The ‘one true art world’ on the other hand has crowded outthe array of diverse possibilities that emerged at the fall of Modernism. These possibilities are not just aesthetic—the diversity of practices suggested by the once-fashionable term Pluralism—but also institutional. The questioning of the single aesthetic standard and historical trajectory that defined Modernism brought about the creation of hundreds of so-called alternative spaces, dedicated precisely to cultivating alternative visions of the arts. The term post-Modern meanwhile came--initially in the field of architecture--to stand for this new sense of openness and possibility. With the emergence of new opportunities for historically excluded populations such as women and artists of color as well as an increasing interest in the arts of contemporary non-Western cultures, it seemed to some as if we were on the verge of a new age, vastly more dynamic and inspiring than what had come before.

Yet where do we find ourselves today? Do we live in a world where, liberated from the restrictions of ideological boundaries and inspired by cultural difference artists are celebrated for the sheer creativity and diversity of their work? Sadly, not. It seems we have, instead, traded one set of restrictions for another. In today’s ‘one true art world,’ you are not welcome unless you speak the common conceptual tongue, a tongue that is not as universal as its champions would have. Indeed, while international biennials nowtake place in Pusan, Dakar, Sharjah, and Shanghai, the works of art one finds in them depend on a set of styles, methods, and themes that are largely the product of Western, especially American cultural institutions (i.e. schools, galleries, magazines, etc.). What is this if not another form of neo-conservativism in which the wolf of American hegemony and economic advantage is guised in the sheep’s clothing of free-trade and cosmopolitanism? Just because McDonald’s is everywhere doesn’t mean its good for you. Is this really the art world we want to inhabit? Are the measures of accomplishment in this ‘one true art world’ truly the ‘educational effectiveness indicators’ we should aspire to fulfill? In my role as an art school administrator I will be dwelling on these question for some time to come and, I trust, imagining alternatives. As artists who are about to begin your professional careers, you too may choose to resist the narcotic allure of the ‘one true art world.’ Unlike curators, dealers, collectors, and critics, you have the power to create, and in your creativity lies the possibility for imagining not one but countless diverse and dynamic art worlds. I encourage you to confound expectations, make your own rules, make your own institutions, and thrive in the margins. Show the ‘one true art world’ a thing or two. And have a wonderful time doing it.

The U.C. Berkeley Art Alumni Group was formed to help promote the improvement and esteem of UC Berkeley's Art Practice Department, and the art community surrounding it. Alumni members benefit from educational and professional opportunities, social activities, and continued community support.